According to Gettier, the conditions of knowledge that have generally been accepted by philosophers are 1. What they know is true in and of itself, 2. The person believes it, and 3. The person has some sort of justification for believing it. Therefore, if one has a justified true belief, then one knows something.
Nevertheless, he finds these conditions unacceptable for two main reasons. The first one is that one can be justified in believing something that is not true. Furthermore, he believes that when one establishes logical causal associations, these may falter as well. He provides two cases that show that justified true belief “does not state a sufficient condition for someone's knowing a given proposition” (Gettier 2).
The first case he proposes to prove this shows that one can have a justified true belief whose justification does not correspond to the true situation. He knew that the person that would get the job would have ten coins in his pockets, yet this was only an association that he had made on the basis of other justified beliefs that were supposedly true. Therefore, Gettier demonstrates that one can know something without knowing that one actually knows it.
It seems to be that the main problems have to do with the deductions and associations made. These tend to be abstract, and typically use conjunctions. Therefore, it is important to be rigorous and clear when establishing what one knows, avoiding ambiguity as much as possible. As a whole, the main problem is that one can have knowledge out of pure luck, without having actual reasons that justify the relationship between one’s thoughts and the truth. Therefore, there is the additional condition of not having it be by luck that one actually knows something. This would be stronger than a mere justification, as Gettier proved that this could be problematic.
Works Cited
Gettier, Edmund. “Is True Belief Justified Knowledge?” Word document.
